
The Mother of All Questions
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Narrated by:
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Tanya Eby
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By:
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Rebecca Solnit
About this listen
In a timely and incisive follow-up to her national best seller Men Explain Things to Me, Rebecca Solnit offers sharp commentary on women who refuse to be silenced, misogynistic violence, the fragile masculinity of the literary canon, the gender binary, the recent history of rape jokes, and much more. In her characteristic style, Solnit mixes humor, keen analysis, and sharp insight in these 11 essays.
©2017 Rebecca Solnit (P)2017 TantorListeners also enjoyed...
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By: Rebecca Solnit
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A Paradise Built in Hell
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In this personal, eloquently-argued essay—adapted from the much-admired TEDx talk of the same name—Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie offers readers a unique definition of feminism for the twenty-first century. Drawing extensively on her own experiences and her deep understanding of the often masked realities of sexual politics, here is one remarkable author’s exploration of what it means to be a woman now—and an of-the-moment rallying cry for why we should all be feminists.
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Performance
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With Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit makes a radical case for hope as a commitment to act in a world whose future remains uncertain and unknowable. Drawing on her decades of activism and a wide knowledge of environmental, cultural, and political history, Solnit argues that radicals have a long, neglected history of transformative victories, that the positive consequences of our acts are not always immediately seen, directly knowable, or even measurable.
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Hope indeed!
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Performance
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In this personal, eloquently-argued essay—adapted from the much-admired TEDx talk of the same name—Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie offers readers a unique definition of feminism for the twenty-first century. Drawing extensively on her own experiences and her deep understanding of the often masked realities of sexual politics, here is one remarkable author’s exploration of what it means to be a woman now—and an of-the-moment rallying cry for why we should all be feminists.
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compelling
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- Unabridged
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Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
“In the spring of 1936, a writer planted roses.” So begins Rebecca Solnit’s new book, a reflection on George Orwell’s passionate gardening and the way that his involvement with plants, particularly flowers, illuminates his other commitments as a writer and antifascist, and on the intertwined politics of nature and power. Sparked by her unexpected encounter with the roses he reportedly planted in 1936, Solnit’s account of this overlooked aspect of Orwell’s life journeys through his writing and his actions.
-
-
Absolutely Awful!
- By asdf on 04-06-22
By: Rebecca Solnit
-
A Field Guide to Getting Lost
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- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A Field Guide to Getting Lost draws on emblematic moments and relationships in Solnit's own life to explore issues of wandering, being lost, and the uses of the unknown. The result is a distinctive, stimulating, and poignant voyage of discovery.
-
-
meditation on the 'other' side of life
- By Audy Meadow Davison LMT on 09-05-16
By: Rebecca Solnit
What listeners say about The Mother of All Questions
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Geoff Rothschild
- 09-26-19
words (and the way they’re pronounced) matter.
i’ve downloaded many books recently read by narrators who egregiously mispronounce alarming numbers of words. this plea- to make it stop- goes out not only to the narrators in question, but to whomever is in the booth. kindly get a clue. IT’S A FREAKING AUDIO BOOK. IT’S KIND OF THE WHOLE POINT.
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- Jimmy
- 06-02-23
Great discussion on power and gender
Liked this work and the author so much. Excited to listen to the first two installments of this trilogy.
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- Danica
- 12-10-24
Love it!
So Rebecca Solnit--I was late to discovering her; she is my new favorite. Particularly when she talks about feminism. Brilliant writer. May have been obsessively reading her stuff ever since I found her.
For this entire book, I was just going "YES!!!"
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- Amazon Customer
- 11-12-21
run on and on and on and on and on sentence.
there are rivers that meander less then this endless argument that completely dilutes a valuable topic. what may I ask is the authors point? we run from gun violence to a man with a uterus in so many paragraphs with out addressing a thesis. I came to this book to better understand the female condition within the context of our current culture. I have one hour left and I am no better educated on the topic.
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- Shielding C
- 08-13-21
Rambling, SWERFy, Dated
I found myself annoyed pretty quickly by Solnit's stream-of-consciousness style. Some people might very much enjoy all the poetic-sounding musings loosely connecting a wide variety of personal and pop-culture events, but I found myself frustrated by the vagueness of points she was making. Her ruminations on "silence," for example, keep changing the definition of silence in a way that made it difficult for me to assess what point she was trying to make. It seemed at times to be a free-association exercise.
This wouldn't have bothered me so much if her work fell purely into the categories of poetry, memoir, or creative expression, but she also makes serious arguments about contested issues. Her commentary on porn and prostitution (her word) is a prime example. Sex workers' rights is a very important topic she knows to be divisive. Get as poetic as you like about the nature of male violence when you know everyone is pretty much on the same page, but when you're outlining an argument that porn isn't actually speech I think you owe it to your feminist audience to be crystal-clear on your position.
Solnit's poetic and rambling style provides her cover to avoid accountability when she strongly implies, for example, that young women who watch porn aren't prepared to fend off sexual assault, and that the sex workers leading the sex workers' rights movement are white and middle-class with no experience of coercive working conditions. (She doesn't say this directly, she implies it by mentioning that she knows a few sex workers who are white and middle class and not coerced before reminding us that trafficking does exist - as though her sex-worker friends would need her to explain this.)
Ultimately, her Sex Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminism is why I gave her work two stars, but I will add that many of her pop-culture analyses have NOT aged well. It was funny in a sad way when she praised the great male feminists Aziz Ansari and CK Louis, for example. I gave an audible groan when she described the final reckoning against Bill Cosby that surely proved the progress feminism has made. Maybe if she had any friends in the sex industry with experience being poor and nonwhite and familiar with workplace coercion (or if she weren't so eager to erase such knowledge from sex workers she does know) she would have known better than to believe everyone who calls themselves an ally.
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